Word: ayckbourn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...theater artist has been sabotaged by praise more cruelly than Alan Ayckbourn. The British playwright was hailed in the 1970s for a string of comedies that, thanks to their abundant laughs and popularity in London's West End, got him dubbed the "British Neil Simon." That wildly inaccurate moniker stuck, even as Ayckbourn's early comedies, like Absurd Person Singular, gave way to increasingly dark and adventurous work - plays that were no longer surefire hits in London and in most cases never even got produced...
...there's a bittersweet quality to the new Broadway revival of Ayckbourn's celebrated trilogy The Norman Conquests. First produced in 1973, it's one of his most grandly entertaining works: three plays that chronicle the same traumatic family weekend in an English country house from three vantage points - dining room, sitting room and garden. It is packed with laughs, brimming with stage tomfoolery (a character who leaves the dining room in one play shows up in the sitting room in the next) and staged superbly by Matthew Warchus, in a production first seen at London's Old Vic Theatre...
...some ways, it's a shame. The Norman Conquests is so damned funny (though grounded, as Ayckbourn's comedy always is, in real human emotion) that it may simply perpetuate the misconception of Ayckbourn as a skilled boulevard entertainer. Which would leave American audiences still largely ignorant of the astonishing body of work by - controversial-pronouncement alert! - the greatest living English-language playwright...
This mix of emotions, the intricate tightrope walk between comedy and tragedy--Ayckbourn's greatest feat, really--may be why his work has got short shrift in America. Early in his career, after such West End (and occasional Broadway) successes as Absurd Person Singular, Ayckbourn was labeled, patronizingly, the "British Neil Simon." But as his plays have grown darker and more complex, Broadway has largely abandoned him. Although Communicating Doors, one of his lesser comedies, had a successful run off-Broadway a couple of seasons back and Comic Potential, his latest West End hit, will be produced this fall...
...sure, American productions of Ayckbourn are usually botched; directors tend to broaden the comedy and stomp all over the delicate (and very British) nuances. It's as if they still believe that silly Neil Simon tag. Better to compare Ayckbourn--who, at 61, has written nearly 60 plays and directs them himself--to another artist whose work was misunderstood in his lifetime, Alfred Hitchcock. Both worked in popular genres that had few pretensions to art--the suspense thriller and the domestic comedy. Both were technical virtuosos who loved to set themselves challenges in their chosen medium. And both managed...